Nicholas Hilliard by Elizabeth Goldring – the inventor of British art?

Vanity, gold and tokens of love – how a miniaturist persuaded Tudor England that painters weren’t just artisans but artists

A good-looking and immaculately primped man gazes back at us from under an elegant cap tilted to show off brown curls. He has quizzical manicured eyebrows, a beard trimmed to a fine point, and a white ruff collar whose lacy elaborations frame his tapered face and set off his black silk shoulders. This self-portrait is vain as hell. The picture of his own dapper handsomeness that Nicholas Hilliard created in 1577, when he was about 30, is a revolutionary assertion that artists are stars who belong in the best society.

Hilliard’s Self-Portrait is tiny – a disc of vellum just over 4cm in diameter. That is the typical scale of his portraits of contemporaries from Elizabeth I to her gifted courtiers Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh. That’s about as far as most people’s knowledge of Hilliard goes, but in her landmark scholarly biography of this brilliant Elizabethan, Elizabeth Goldring argues that he was something bigger: the inventor of British art.

Hilliard never got rich, partly because he spent so much on looking the part of a gentleman

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